Last night we started our raid week as we are wont to do, killing new “farmed” content for gear upgrades before we start tackling the encounters we haven’t mastered yet. In this case, we started in ICC, clearing up to Putricide. Despite the occasional lag the first wing went fairly smoothly, however we did have one wipe on Saurfang do to some sloppy play. I largely wrote this off to the “cocky” factor. You know the one I’m talking about. The one where people are largely on auto-pilot and think “we’ve done this I don’t have to think”. Except that doesn’t really work well on that fight, and it seems to take a wipe to remind people that it’s time to wake up.

As we moved into the plagueworks, the trash was also a bit sloppy. Not to the point that it wiped the raid, but people failed to kill things before they exploded, completely ignored whether or not the tank had agro before AEing on larger packs, and just all around were a bit sloppy. Someone commented to me that we seemed a bit sloppy that particular evening, and I told him “eh, it’s just trash, I try not to holler unless it’s wipey and wasting our time”. When he pointed out that Saurfang was a bit messy too, I gave him my theory on raid cockiness.

Of course, as we are getting ready to pull Festergut our tank indicates that he needs to restart his machine due to massing lag he’s getting so we call a short AFK while he does this. In this period of time someone decides they want a better look at Festergut and takes a step too close and pulls him. At that point I said “Or perhaps it’s just one of ‘those’ nights”. You know them, we all have them!

Our Festergut kill this week wasn’t nearly as clean as last week’s. Well, the kill was, but leading up to the kill was not. We lost a pull from a tank death, due to needing to make a slight tweak with the healing. We lost a pull from our DK being in unholy presence. We lost a pull because he enraged (to be fair we had one of our DPS fully offline for almost the whole fight and one dead). The actual kill was fairly clean though. But…all of those things were mistakes that happen, but should have been prevented.

I am also starting to think that Rotface is one of those fights that is going to be a bane to me. I don’t know how many times I am going have to tell people to stay the fuck out of the green shit on the ground. No, really. GREEN IS NOT YOUR COLOR, TRUST ME, AS A WOMAN I KNOW. It may get better in time, and I do think it took us roughly the same number of pulls this week as last. The kill was a sloppy mess by the end, but I think that is largely because our slime tank kissed the giant ooze and bit it. Up to that point in our kill though it was running fairly clean.

After the raid I got to thinking. I attributed somethings to things just seeming “off”, but I didn’t really isolate why they were “off”. Granted, sometimes you can’t. It’s just not your night, and nothing is going to change that. But sometimes I do that that off nights can be attributed to other things. Last night I wonder if it wasn’t somewhat my doing. I, personally, was “off” when I came into the raid. I wasn’t exactly phoning my performance in, but I also wasn’t at the level I normally am.

By the time our raid rolled around, I was pretty beat down from the day. I had been very upset the night before when my 10 man group failed to kill putricide but saw a multitude of sub-10% wipes, while the other group knocked him out in 3 pulls. I was struggling dealing with it because I have to put on a positive face for the guild “Hey, at least a ‘Monolith’ team knocked him out, we should be happy about that. And we got lots of good work on him”, yet on the inside I’m raging “how the fuck can our first pull hit 9% and we failed to kill the asshole”. And while I truly was happy the other group got him, I was extremely disappointed mine did not. Only I can’t really let everyone know exactly how disappointed I am, so instead I log out and go shower hoping that 30 minutes under the hot water will just wash it all away.

That same night Brade and I had a spat that wasn’t resolved and so carried over into the next day (I am told this is a thing only women do, hell if I know if that’s true or not!). Of course, that same day we had our Annual Reviews at work which always stress me out hugely regardless of the fact that I always take myself out to lunch afterwards to wind down. Add on top of that the potential recruit that I was speaking with, who is hugely promising, made one of those statements that you wish they hadn’t because it starts to give you second thoughts and makes you /facepalm irl. So, needless to say, by the time I hit the raid I was pretty emotionally and physically deflated.

After the raid I wondered, “could the raid feel that jibe from me”? Even though I tried not to convey how I was feeling, I wonder how much of it came out anyhow. I wonder if people noticed that I was not my usual self that night, if not directly, maybe on subconscious level. I wonder if my off-ed-ness infected the raid, spreading like the plague from one pull to the next, creating a bit of off-ed-ness for everyone else as well.

I think, probably, yes. Even if perhaps it was not direct, I suspect people knew something was up with me last night. Very similar to when you can tell that your boss is not having a good day at work, and you subsequently spend all day trying to avoid them, I think that my guildmates can probably tell when I’m “off”, and I’m sure it has some kind of impact on them. Well, that and I tend to have a tad less patience when I’m in a “mood”…which means I might holler a little bit more :P

I suppose that I do believe individual attitudes can affect the raid as a whole, whether you intend them to or not. In my case, I was just “down” and I think that came out, and people read that. Granted being in a position of leadership, people are likely to be more in tune with my attitude than they might be otherwise. However, I could see how some negativity, such as any member continuously commenting “god this is retarded” or “this sucks” might start to infect those they are around. On the converse, “great job” or “here is what we did well” comments might also foster positive results as well.

Some of the most wipe-fest craptastic raids I’ve been in have been when there’s some underlying tension, in or out of game. One time, the officers got into a tiff about something or other in /ochat, and even after we agreed to put the issue on hold because it was raid time, we were all really annoyed with each other and it showed.

Failing in general is a slippery slope. Once you wipe a certain number of times, you just start getting worse, not better, as the entire raid gets demoralized. It’s hard to pull out of that nosedive, and everyone feeds off each other.

One of my favorite sayings of all times is “What would you attempt if you knew you couldn’t fail?”. I think it says so much. If you knew you would succeed at 100% of the things you tried, what wouldn’t you try?!

I think your more on the right line with the “cocky” line of thinking. It also probably doesn’t do people any favors that the first 3 fights in ICC are so much easier than Saurfang and the Plagueworks. People are on cruise control for the easy fights. Then once you get further in people are starting to get tired and aren’t as sharp.

The delay before Festergut also served as a distraction. I’ve always noticed that anytime you have a long break in a raid be it from an afk, long boss explaination, etc. the next pull is almost always a disaster. People just have sort attention spans and lose their concentration.

That’s not to say that a leader’s attitude/emotional state can’t rub off on a raid, but I don’t think that is the case in the situation described.

Perhaps. Of course, perhaps it was my Putricide voiceover work that threw people through a loop as well :P (Although, that is probably quite the contrary…as I’m fairly certain that woke some people up!).

I think it’s impossible for your attitude to not affect the raid … I mean one’s attitude, not yours personally. No matter how self-aware you are, no matter how much your compartmentalise if you’re a bit down and stressed of course then everything is going to crash a little loud around you – multiply that by the moods of 24 or 9 other people and *chaos has come again* :)

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